25 :

Work was routine. Always has been, always will be. I am, like everyone else these days, now that the manufacturing industry has largely been outsourced and the service industry relegated to those who still live with their parents, a desk jockey. King of all my pedestal can capture. King of all I survey, which is just a screen, a plank of wood, a two or three drawer cabinet, and nothing more.

I hang up my jacket, steer my desk around me, and boot up my PC. After an indeterminable age and another warning message from the corporation that all my activities may be audited and monitored, to ensure I am not designing nuclear weapons behind my desk, I enter my log in. I am not a name, I am a number, an ID card, a nonsensical password “hunjezbon”, a role, a team player, a neighbour, a cipher, a happy fucking consumer.

I am all these things but most of the time I forget I am anything except a mouth that talks, a hand that moves, a body that works, a stomach that needs, a person that owes. I am a wallet. And so the email, and voicemail, and snail-mail, and anything else I might need to respond to, anything else that may require my no doubt essential attention. I am all that stands between mankind and certain destruction. More of which later.

I don’t want to be uncovered. I want to get through life like a spy : unnoticed, my contempt for this world I despise hidden, a quiet life, a handshake, and carbon monoxide. This is my game plan. Remain unnoticed.

Despite all this, I, like all others, attempt to conform, to fit in. My life shaved and poured into a suit, a uniform, an image I am not. Hair regulated. The cut of the jacket correct. The biting of the tongue when necessary. The tolerating of powerful idiots.

It’s a game. It’s a race. There can only be one winner, and despite all other things, I am not one of those. If I can fool people into thinking that I am all the things I appear to be, that is, professional, competent, strong, well-balanced, maybe then I can climb the corporate ladder high enough to see the wreckage that we have spawned.

I’m a faker. I bluff my way through life, awaiting the great unmasking.

They say that procrastination is the thief of time. But we all know, work is the thief of time. And there is never enough time.

Work is able to stretch or squash time in infinite ways. Certain people have to stretch and expand seemingly tiny responsibilities into full time posts. Like a vacuum the time is filled by how much – or little – work there is. It’s an art learning how to appear busy when not actually achieving or doing anything – how to increase a minor act of deliberation into brow furrowing, vitally important concentration. I once spent an afternoon procrastinating the meaning of a single word in an e-mail. Work and time became elastic.

Or vice versa. Some people have so much responsibility, so much to do, that it becomes a sysyphusian task to overcome the state. Endlessly one pushes a rock up the hill, to push it down the hill, to push it back up. Either way, the effort or lack thereof, is normally unnoticed by those who can influence it. We are all slaves. Trapped in routine. We run in circles and wonder why we get nowhere.

Work is a control mechanism. Overwork or underwork, is deliberately controlled to influence behaviour. In Japan, the ancient art of Constructive Dismissal is another weapon. A common business practice of reducing a worker’s workload to nil - they leave of their own accord. Career suicide. And once, after years of corporate-controlled boredom, after hours and years of underutilised employment, there was one they had to push. Who would not jump. Fired. Others are overworked to leave.

Either your manager sees you as someone who is either overworked or underworked. Your desk says more than your mouth ever does. A messy desk of papers cannot meet their deadlines. An empty desk is an underworked desk. It’s not how good you are at your work. It’s how well they think you can fit in with their safe little Status Quo.

A good consumer. A happy worker. A drone making money for the fold. You pay us. We buy things. The money goes back into the economy. Profit. That is simple economics.

Those who’ve had a good idea – even just once – can make it last their lifetime. The man who invented the Post-It note? A simple, easy idea – to stick adhesive onto paper – and able to dine out on it for the rest of his life. His working day is probably expanded into a series of concentrated daydreaming, surfing the Internet, and living off his few seconds of inspiration. His manager probably will never even notice is work productivity is minimal. In fact, his manager probably encourages him to write bad novels on corporate time.

At any one time in any organisation, approximately 0.3% of the workforce have a second rate corporate novel locked somewhere in their profiles. IT Managers enjoy reading them. Thank God for the Internet though – the less people writing drivel and absorbed in conspiracy trivia, the better. Everybody’s writing novels nobody else will read. The laptop turned us all from readers on the morning train, to writers, trying to type our way to glory. Trying to convert our rented dreams into bestselling slices of printed immortality.

There are different ways of doing this. Typing bad novels, ill thought emails, or just working hard. Today, like any other day was a mixture of boredom, stress, and confusion.

Something was different when I entered the office. The air crackled. Something other than electricity. Something had changed. Something big, so big that it couldn’t be seen, or even comprehended. Something like, when you stand on the face of the earth, you have no idea that’s it round. It just looks flat. It’s so big that you can’t really comprehend the true size.

Maybe they knew that last night I, the eternal cynic, made love for the first time in ten months and five days.